The ever-growing burden of tourism on people, places, and the atmosphere has exploded into view this year. Barcelona has seen AirBnB protests, Venice charges admission fees, while the industry pumps out 5 gigatons of pollution each year. Australian resorts are under-serviced, with housing pressures on worker and tourist alike.

Packaged, fly-by-night “travel experiences” produce endless frustration.

So what if we abandon the bucket list traps in favour of more thoughtful travel, closer to home, or one place at a time? And what of the new possibilities when our “dream destination” is a world we’ve left better than the way we found it?

Aims:

Our panel discussion focusses on changing attitudes to tourism. It features grounded tourists who have experienced the charming small places they travel through, as well as their shock at overblown mass tourism destinations. We welcome a local researcher studying degrowth action and potential for Australian tourism, and we summarise the year in aviation greenwashing. 2024 saw a billion dollars set aside for fantastical aviation fuels, no targets for aviation emissions reduction from our federal government, and an airport expansion for Melbourne with no regard for our climate.

We aim to demonstrate how people can travel – and are travelling - without the massive carbon burden of aviation emissions. Beyond this, we want to show how we can walk more lightly on local places, and what a truly sustainable model of tourism might look like.

https://flightfree.net.au

This event is part of the National Sustainability Festival.

Update:

Panellists:

Our panellists have travelled all around the world. Teresa and Dennis are still traveling, and their thousands of followers on Instagram, at "Human Travel Stories", see the joy they have found on their “local public transport” journey from Germany to Australia. We will welcome them online from Asia. humantravelstories.com/

How does truly sustainable tourism differ from the greenwashing of eco-tourism? Ask our panelist, Yannic Kuna, an advocate and researcher of degrowth and member of Degrowth Network Australia. He is currently doing a post-graduate degree in International Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and looking into Degrowth Tourism. https://www.facebook.com/degrowthnetworkaustralia/

Joining us as a panelist is Mark Carter, who has been researching aviation’s contribution to global warming for the last 6 years and helped set up both Flight Free Australia — http://www.flightfree.net.au and the No 3rd Tulla Runway coalition, and researched and wrote The elephant in the sky: the hazards of aviation emissions and how we can avoid them. As a Flightfree pledger, he is keen to avoid the burden of overtourism.